Graphs: Soulcalibur II Sales

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Ladies and gentlemen, the power of Link.

By IGN Staff

Blame Nintendo's decision to make a controller with less buttons than the competition's. Blame it on less third-party support for GameCube than for PlayStation 2 or Xbox. Or don't. But for one reason or another Nintendo waged an uphill battle in 2002 and 2003 as it attempted to draw fighter-genre fans to its powerful home system. This was true, we remind you, despite the fact that Super Smash Bros., the number-one seller on GCN, could be labeled a 3D fighter under the right circumstances.

You could say that Nintendo won a major victory for its cause in the latter half of last year when it teamed with developer Namco to bring Soulcalibur II, the sequel to the Dreamcast fighter-hit Soul Calibur (yes, the two are spelled differently), to the system. Though the game would also come to both PlayStation 2 and Xbox, the two Japanese giants devised a way to ensure that the GCN build was special to Nintendo fans: they exclusively included Legend of Zelda hero Link as a fully playable character.

So now that 2003 has come to an end, how did the three separate versions sell through December? Phenomenally well. But in a trend that we as Nintendo fans certainly hope continues, the GameCube version outperformed both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in year-end sales. Namco sold 500,000 copies of SCII for GCN; it sold 447,000 units for PS2; and it sold 320,000 units for Xbox.

This is a remarkable feat considering GameCube's disadvantages going into the race. First, true or not, it was a console dented by the perception that fighting games were somehow made lesser using its controller. Second, it didn't have as large of an installed base as either Xbox or PlayStation 2. Indeed, through December GCN's installed base was at around 7 million units in the US; Xbox 7.7 million and PlayStation 2 a whopping 22 million. Gamers still lined up to get the GameCube version more than any other. Soulcalibur II for GameCube was Namco's top seller for the year, in fact. Take a look at this week's graph: